


an old ruin

by allovera



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 06:27:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14710839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allovera/pseuds/allovera
Summary: She reminded him of young, eager children journeying through the sky, smiles bright and spirits free.'You radiate', he wanted to say, but knew she wouldn't believe him."Who taught you to dance?" he asked instead.





	an old ruin

Their second trek through Salikawood had been arduous. Familiarity with both the meandering terrain and wandering fiends had done little to hasten their strides - no, as they journeyed further west into Nabradia a heavy weight seemed to settle on the shoulders of the leading party, their footsteps digging heavy into the dirt.

Ashe's gaze remained dark, her grip white-boned against her greatsword as she led the group with violent, charged steps. Basch remained faithfully behind her, his mouth set in a grim line and gaze constantly, rapidly, sweeping the area.

Balthier couldn't begrudge them their tense silence. Whether walking towards the homeland of a young-slain husband or the shattered reflection of a distant childhood, little cheer could be driven out of weary, grief-laden bones. He debated attempting to lesson the atmosphere his own way, quips and challenges and ill-timed remarks alike, but despite weighing down on him, the silence felt fitting.

Distantly he wondered if he was feeling some pressure of his own, the stain of his father's legacy so close at hand.

He shook his head free of such thoughts and glanced around.

At his side Balthier could sense Fran's mounting anxiety - a minor tremor of her fingers and shortened intakes of breath, nose twitching violently whenever the breeze switched direction. He knew the mist before them was tainted, even without foreknowledge of its dark history.

Even Penelo seemed scattered, her eyes often unfocused and a curious lack of chatter between her and her blundering companion. Balthier hadn’t realized how often she brightened the air through simple means - humming melodies as they walked, gathering tips and techniques for whichever weapon she had taken to mastering this turn around (a katana this month, he recalled, a weapon none in their group could claim to have mastered).

It had been Vaan who suggested they rest - the party could have easily made it to the borders of Nabudis before nightfall at this pace - and Balthier was once again forced to remind himself of the boy's uncanny perception. It was easy enough to forget, given his proclivity to following his own ( _young, brash, violent_ ) emotions blindly, but even the princess looked grateful, protesting for only a few scant moments. Sleeping in the outer reaches of the Salikawood was a safer alternative than a haven for ghosts, both for body and mind alike.

They efficiently set up camp, process routine and unconscious after so many nights spent beneath the sky, and dinner was an awkward, stilted affair.

Despite her previous lethargy, Penelo offered first watch with a some semblance of her normal self. Nobody contested, each eager to drain off as much of the tension as possible. Balthier imagined nightmares would greet most in their sleep, but that wasn’t particularly a contentious statement with this group. Perhaps the rough pace did them well, and dead sleep would smother any nightly visions.

Lost in his thoughts, Balthier almost missed the near-imperceptible glance Basch sent his way. He frowned. Despite seeing first hand how capable their youngest members were, Basch still demanded a secondary watch on them during the night, if not someone take over for them entirely. Vestiges of Vaan’s brother, he assumed, or Penelo’s kidnapping. Regardless, Balthier was sorely tempted to recount a previous spar between the young girl and the wayward captain, where Penelo had swept under his blow with such speed and grace that the followup slam of the back of her blade against Basch’s shoulder seemed vulgar in comparison. She had apologized profusely after he dropped his sword and fell to the ground of course, a flush of exertion and pride spread across her face, but the win was fair and Vaan had rushed in to gather her up in his arms and gloat fiercely, as if the win had been his own.

He met Basch’s gaze and nodded anyway, too tired to put up a fight and knowing Basch would do it himself were he to refuse. That Basch asked him at all instead of just watching from a distance himself spoke volumes on the state of the captain’s mind, and Balthier could manage magnanimity when he put his mind to it.

He caught Penelo watching their exchange out of the corner of his eyes, saw the frown settling on her brow, and sighed. Maybe he could take a quick nap somewhere Basch wouldn’t sense him and give the kid some time on her own. She probably needed it.

\--

Balthier had managed little more than letting his thoughts circle themselves into bitterness while he watched the dying embers of the fire. Everyone else seemed to be sleeping soundly for now, the night air comfortably cool. If not for the destination looming only a scant distance away, the environment might be positively calming, but Balthier assumed it was only a matter of time before one of them started thrashing about in their sleep. They were all used to it by now, had been forced to become accustomed to getting sleep wherever they could lay their heads, but an uninterrupted sleep sounded like a luxury that Balthier would pay an embarrassing amount to obtain.

Now, though, was not the time to lament the lack of inn-inclusive points to their travelogue, he thought, and pushed himself up to go find Penelo. 

He could see the top of her head bobbing up and down beyond an overturned trunk. His heart beat soared into his throat for a brief moment, hand sliding across his hip to settle on his gun, but he couldn’t hear the sounds of a struggle and her moment seemed too even, too precise, to account for any sort of fight. 

He didn’t know if he should feel annoyed or relieved. A fight was something Balthier desperately needed - the monsters roaming the Salikawood seemed cowed by the chill of the Deadlands, preferring to gather in clumps near the thick, central expanses of trees. Their group hadn’t faced much opposition in stretches of days now, not since being ambushed by a mutated wyvern at the borders of the Highwaste, and being grounded for such a long interim cut him off from one of his few sources of relaxation. His skin was buzzing with pent-up energy, brain muddled with the surrounding grief. Maybe he could goad Vaan into swiping a drink for him. Not that they had any prospect of greeting civilization any time soon - ghosts, potentially. Shadows of gods tearing through the earth.

Suddenly aware he’d been staring at Penelo for upwards of minutes, he shook his head and continued onwards. He assumed she must’ve noticed him by now, though she kept moving steadily in and out of his sightline without pausing. Dancing, he belatedly realized.

She threw him a quick glance as he ducked under a tangle of branches, a bemused glint in her eyes.

Balthier shrugged in response. Why Basch ever bothered with the pretense of being subtle about his paranoia, Blather wasn’t sure, but he figured at the very least he could save Penelo the strain of a distant watch.

He applauded softly as her steps lost focus and she began slowing down. It didn’t appear to be an exertion of any sort - if anything she looked more rested than Balthier had felt in months. _Youth._

“Beautiful,” he commented, genuinely.

Penelo scoffed, hand waving vaguely in his direction while her gaze swept the perimeter.

"You're not from Dalmasca, are you Balthier?" she asked, small smile on her face as she settled down against the edge of the tree.

Balthier's eyes widened momentarily, somewhat shocked - panicked, before he remembered that it probably didn’t matter, not really - and met her gaze, letting out a soft laugh.

"That common a dance, is it?"

She nodded, turning away from him again to scan the horizon. The mist had cleared somewhat with the setting of the sun, dull patches of starlight struggling to make their way through the dense treetops. He could hear the faint running of water against the wind, but no thrashes of monsters or apparitions hit his senses. There were a few roaming glows of bombs in the distance, dancing about like fairies against the recessing mist, but they made no move to approach the pair.

"I can't imagine anyone from home would be impressed with such a simple thing," she began, eyes flickering to and from nearby peaks, voice steadily growing softer until she added, almost as an afterthought, "and with such a sight performing it."

"Ah, but who could cast their eyes aside from such grace and beauty, despite familiarity?" 

Penelo let out a laugh, short and self-deprecating, and waved off his statement with a simple shake of her head.

Miles away from the young girl he’d charmed away with the wave of a handkerchief, so long ago. Charmed, he said, though the proper summation might have more accurately been distracted momentarily from sobbing.

He thought briefly to take her to a pool of water, to point out the many and intricate ways she was mistaken. He had seen a fair variety of dancers across the lands, from the ceremonial steps of priestesses, to the deadened, sultry breathes littered throughout corners of Old Archades. She reminded him of young, eager children journeying through the sky, smiles bright and spirits free.

_You radiate_ , he wanted to say, but knew she wouldn't believe him.

"Who taught you to dance?" he asked instead.

She laughed again, softer this time, and answered, “Everyone, I suppose. It’s not as if I could go to one of the schools for it, or anything - there was this old lady in Old Town, though, Hana, who would gather up anyone who would listen and rambled on and on about how she used to perform personally for the court.”

“Did she?” Balthier asked.

Penelo hummed. “It’s possible, I suppose, though with the amount she drank she could have done just about anything. She was a storyteller, though, and when she danced it really was quite beautiful. I liked listening to her a lot.”

Her voice tapered off as she finished, “She died early from the sickness, though, like most in Old Town. From then on some of the older girls would sneak out and learn the traditional dances through classes and ceremonies, - peering through the windows, mainly, and tried to teach the rest of us. We all kept each other up, really, when we could.”

Balthier snuck another glance at Penelo, her knees now drawn up against her chest and arms tightly drawn around them. He imagined she was talking about a lot more than dancing, but didn’t feel as if he should press it. Vaan often talked about his ragtag group, from their minor thievery to much more dark and frightening escapades ( _always with the same light tone of voice, as if he didn’t recognize the disparity between them_ ), but he’d never heard Penelo speak about friends of her own. 

“Then … there was my mother, of course,” Penelo continued, voice so soft he almost couldn’t hear it, as if she was talking more to herself than him, “before she went back to the war. She didn’t dance so much as just move beautifully, and my brothers always made fun of me when I tried to mimic her.”

There was a silence, where the cool night air seemed weighted in ways Balthier couldn’t quite articulate. He briefly wondered if she had forgotten he was here and was just talking to the distant glow of bombs, but when he turned to question she was looking straight at him. Her eyes were dry and mouth still curved in a small smile, but the faint tremor of her arms didn’t come from the faint breeze.

“They taught me to fight, you know - my brothers,” she continued, eyes turning away again to follow a distant light trail.

“Did they?” he asked.

“Yeah, well - they tried to. I was small and didn’t understand why they wanted me to know how to fight. I’d always have them, I said, and I just - ”

Her voice broke, and as if it was a switch she uncurled herself and began undoing the tight braids on her head.

“Did they die in the war?” Balthier asked, after several more moments of silence. Maybe she just needed someone to talk to about this, he realized. Vaan would already be aware, and he doubted Penelo wanted to remind anyone of loss when it so tightly clung to their group, despite her clearly needing to grieve.

_“She’s always been like this,”_ Vaan had said to Fran. Penelo had caught a minor sickness when they trudged through the Paramina Rift, and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone until she collapsed in the middle of a rather grueling fight with an ice elemental. Balthier had thought Vaan’s ensuing panic would be the death of them all until he unleashed such a devastatingly strong wave of fire magic that the ice beneath the apparition had been gouged several meters in depth. 

_“Even before Reks -, even before the war she tried to take everything on herself,”_ he continued, sitting near the fire as Penelo slept through the worst of it, _“she never complained, just went out and got a job while I was still running around the streets shaking my fist at the sky. Everyone was gone but she just - she kept on trying.”_

Fran hadn’t asked who “everyone” was.

“No,” Penelo said, voice more steady now that she had unfurled her braids. Her hair was longer than Balthier had estimated, brushing at the base of her shoulder blades as it drifted in the breeze.

“After my parents died, they had this sort of fervor about them,” she continued, “ ‘Death to the Empire’ and all that - it was a common thought, but people who vocalized it, they - well, they both joined some rebel group, some resistance, and I never saw them again.”

Balthier started. He didn’t know what he had expected, maybe some grand tale of betrayal and heartbreak like Vaan’s, but her dull acknowledgement that maybe - 

“So they might be -?” he started, trying to work his way around her emotional shift, around this tumble of old grief.

She shook her head, eyes taking on a shine for the first time in the conversation. Her brows were furrowed, though, and a tired sort of anger hung on her words.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, “some man came into Migelo’s one night and said he recognized me - said he saw my brothers’ bodies in the reaches of the Estersand, but he was rank with the smell of spirits and no one could ever verify anything.”

As he stared wide-eyed, Balthier pondered the timeline; where was he in the skies, bouncing from bounty to bounty in free-spirited revelry, while two children, who under any normal circumstances he never would have met, had their worlds crash around them?

“I …” she started hesitantly, words once again faded to the point he could barely hear them, “I don’t know which would be worse: them being alive and never coming back or them being dead and me never knowing.”

There was a bomb headed their direction in the far off distance, meandering lazily through the dense undergrowth. Balthier tracked its movement as the minutes passed by, unable to think of anything to say. The loss of his mother was abstract and disconnected, and he actively avoided thinking about his father. Neither seemed to be a situation that could compare to hers. 

“Sorry,” Penelo whispered, a contrite smile on her face as she sent a few pulses of magic towards a barrier he hadn’t noticed, “Vaan knows better than to sit with me at night.”

Balthier doubted that very much, but recognized her wanting to drop the conversation, and instead asked about the barrier.

“Oh, this?” she asked, and waved her hand vaguely towards her side. A faint green glow seemed to settle in the air - he could have imagined it as mist, or even just ambient starlight. Motes of dust hung in the air and reflected the magic, glowing up like fireflies. It made the the woods seem beautiful, returning some of the grandeur they had lost with the absence of sunlight.

“It’s really weak, more an alarm than anything - but if something passes through the edges, I’ll know and can go take care of it,” she explained, absent-mindedly pulling her katana into her lap and running her hand along the blunt edge.

Balthier had known Penelo was talented, had seen her practice with Fran and study Ashe’s furious power with fear-tinged awe, but this - this was incredible. He hadn’t realized he’d said the last part out loud until he heard a soft exclamation from where she was sitting. Just in case, he repeated himself. Several times.

His gaping must have come across as sincere, because instead of her usual deflections a soft blush formed on her cheeks and she smiled.

“I was asking Fran about the barrier back in Eruyt Village and I’ve wanted to try this since. It’s not the same, obviously, but I thought it might be nice for night watches at least.”

“It’s a spell worthy of situations intricate and simple alike,” he assured her, still trying to process the scope of her magic. Draklor had something similar, if he recalled correctly, but he couldn’t remember if it was fueled by machinery or magic. If it was magic, though, it almost certainly used crystal focuses, maybe even nethicite, so what Penelo had done here - he wanted to praise it more, try to make her see how amazing she was, but he’d seen how she accepted compliments like she didn’t believe them whatsoever.

“Why didn’t you show anyone this before?” he asked instead.

She hummed lightly, blush dissipated and back straight.

“I wanted to test it out a few times, to see how much range I could get and what triggers it or not,” she said and added, with a glint of humor in her eyes, “Plus, some people don’t seem to let me do watches as much as others.”

Balthier snorted. 

“Take it up with the Captain; he’s prone to his worrying.”

Her smile softened again.

“That he is.”

“If you showed him you were capable of this, he’d probably worry less,” he offered.

She laughed.

“I doubt that.”

He doubted it as well, really.

“All the same,” he added, turning his head to look at her again, “you should at least run it by Fran, see if she can’t work out the kinks you’re fretting over.”

She was leaning back against the trunk of the tree now, a small, natural smile on her lips as she attempted to seek out the moon through the foliage. He imagined it was time for her to turn in soon, and he struggled to remember who was supposed to take over for her. If it was Vaan he might just do his best to ignore Basch’s disappointed glower tomorrow, because he was not going to stay conscious much longer. The night was quiet and peaceful, and the thought of traveling onward to Nabudis come sunrise was suddenly daunting.

Penelo turned to face him and, seeming to read his mind, said, “Fran should be showing up soon, so I’ll stay here and let her see it before I go to sleep. You can go on ahead - I won’t tell Basch.”

Balthier grunted an affirmation, stretching out the tightness in his joints before he pushed himself off the ground and dusted himself off. He made his way past her towards the downward slope to their campsite, and impulsively patted Penelo’s head before descending. She let out a short squawk - more surprise than indignation, and before he could leave she reached out and grabbed his hand softly, holding it in place.

He turned back towards her, eyebrow raised, and prepared to say something at least marginally witty, despite his fatigue.

Penelo spoke before his tongue could betray him, thank the gods, and muttered shyly, “Thanks, Balthier. For listening to me.”

He gave her a small smile, and raised his hand again to softly pat her head.

“A leading man always listens to the fair lady’s troubles. We could even try it in the daylight, if you’d prefer.”

Penelo looked up at him as if she expected him to be embarrassed by his own words and wasn’t sure what to do when he clearly wasn’t. The moment passed and she let out a soft laugh, her smile bright and easy.

“Maybe I’ll take the leading man up on his offer when he’s not asleep on his feet. Goodnight, Balthier.” 

He gave her a lazy wave, and turned around to descend to the campsite. He started loosening the straps on his vest before he even reached his bed (“patch of dirt” his mind supplied) and fell asleep before he hit the ground. 

\--

**Author's Note:**

> Random drabble I wrote while playing through the Zodiac Age re-release. Rampant with headcanons, of course, but I think the map is accurate at the very least.


End file.
